I presented a version of this talk at the 2014 Futurebook Conference in London, England. They also kindly featured me in the program. Thank you to The Bookseller for a wonderful conference filled with innovation and intelligent people!

A few days ago, I was in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, often considered the most beautiful library in the world. My enthusiastic guide told the following story:

After the Reformation (when all the books in Oxford were burned), Sir Thomas Bodley decided to create a place where people could go and access all the world’s information at their fingertips, for free.

“What does that sound like?” she asked. “…the Internet?”

While this is a lovely conceit, the part of the story that resonated with me for this talk is the other big change that Bodley made, which was to work with publishers, who were largely a monopoly at that point, to fill his library for free by turning the library into a copyright library. While this seemed antithetical to the ways that publishers worked, in giving a copy of their very expensive books away, they left an indelible and permanent mark on the face of human knowledge. It was not only preservation, but self-preservation.

Bodley was what people nowadays would probably call “an innovator” and maybe even in the parlance of my field, a “community manager.”

By thinking outside of the scheme of how publishing works, he joined together with a group of skeptics and created one of the greatest knowledge repositories in the world, one that still exists 700 years later. This speaks to a few issues:

Sharing economies, community, and publishing should and do go hand in hand and have since the birth of libraries. By stepping outside of traditional models, you are creating a world filled with limitless knowledge and crafting it in new and unexpected ways.

The bound manuscript is one of the most enduring technologies. This story remains relevant because books are still books and people are still reading them.

As the same time, things are definitely changing. For the most part, books and manuscripts were pretty much identifiable as books and manuscripts for the past 1000 years.

But what if I were to give Google Maps to a 16^th Century Map Maker? Or what if I were to show Joseph Pulitzer Medium? Or what if I were to hand Gutenberg a Kindle? Or Project Gutenberg for that matter? What if I were to explain to Thomas Bodley how I shared the new Lena Dunham book with a friend by sending her the file instead of actually handing her the physical book? What if I were to try to explain Lena Dunham?

These innovations have all taken place within the last twenty years, and I would argue that we haven’t even scratched the surface in terms of the innovations that are to come.

We need to accept that the future of the printed word may vary from words on paper to an ereader or computer in 500 years, but I want to emphasize that in the 500 years to come, it will more likely vary from the ereader to a giant question mark.

International literacy rates have risen rapidly over the past 100 years and companies are scrambling to be the first to reach what they call “developing markets” in terms of connectivity. In the vein of Mark Surman’s talk at the Mozilla Festival this year, I will instead call these economies post-colonial economies.

Because we (as people of the book) are fundamentally idealists who believe that the printed word can change lives, we need to be engaged with rethinking the printed word in a way that recognizes power structures and does not settle for the limited choices that the corporate Internet provides (think Facebook vs WhatsApp). This is not as a panacea to fix the world’s ills.

In the Atlantic last year, Phil Nichols wrote an excellent piece that paralleled Web literacy and early 20^th century literacy movements. The dualities between “connected” and “non-connected,” he writes, impose the same kinds of binaries and blind cure-all for social ills that the “literacy” movement imposed in the early 20^th century. In equating “connectedness” with opportunity, we are “hiding an ideology that is rooted in social control.”

Surman, who is director of the Mozilla Foundation, claims that the Web, which had so much potential to become a free and open virtual meeting place for communities, has started to resemble a shopping mall. While I can go there and meet with my friends, it’s still controlled by cameras that are watching my every move and its sole motive is to get me to buy things.

85 percent of North America is connected to the Internet and 40 percent of the world is connected. Connectivity increased at a rate of 676% in the past 13 years. Studies show that literacy and connectivity go hand in hand.

How do you envision a fully connected world? How do you envision a fully literate world? How can we empower a new generation of connected communities to become learners rather than consumers?

I’m not one of these technology nuts who’s going to argue that books are going to somehow leave their containers and become networked floating apparatuses, and I’m not going to argue that the ereader is a significantly different vessel than the physical book.

I’m also not going to argue that we’re going to have a world of people who are only Web literate and not reading books in twenty years. To make any kind of future prediction would be a false prophesy, elitist, and perhaps dangerous.

Although I don’t know what the printed word will look like in the next 500 years,

I want to take a moment to think outside the book,

to think outside traditional publishing models, and to embrace the instantaneousness, randomness, and spontaneity of the Internet as it could be, not as it is now.

One way I want you to embrace the wonderful wide Web is to try to at least partially decouple your social media followers from your community.

Twitter and other forms of social media are certainly a delightful and fun way for communities to communicate and get involved, but your viral campaign, if you have it, is not your community.

True communities of practice are groups of people who come together to think beyond traditional models and innovate within a domain. For a touchstone, a community of practice is something like the Penguin Labs internal innovation center that Tom Weldon spoke about this morning and not like Penguin’s 600,000 followers on Twitter. How can we bring people together to allow for innovation, communication, and creation?

The Internet provides new and unlimited opportunities for community and innovation, but we have to start managing communities and embracing the people we touch as makers rather than simply followers or consumers.

The maker economy is here— participatory content creation has become the norm rather than the exception. You have the potential to reach and mobilize 2.1 billion people and let them tell you what they want, but you have to identify leaders and early adopters and you have to empower them.

How do you recognize the people who create content for you? I don’t mean authors, but instead the ambassadors who want to get involved and stay involved with your brand.

I want to ask you, in the spirit of innovation from the edges

What is your next platform for radical participation? How are you enabling your community to bring you to the next level? How can you differentiate your brand and make every single person you touch psyched to read your content, together? How can you create a community of practice?

Community is conversation. Your users are not your community.

Ask yourself the question Rachel Fershleiser asked when building a community on Tumblr: Are you reaching out to the people who want to hear from you and encouraging them or are you just letting your community be unplanned and organic?

There reaches a point where we reach the limit of unplanned organic growth. Know when you reach this limit.

Target, plan, be upbeat, and encourage people to talk to one another without your help and stretch the creativity of your work to the upper limit.

Does this model look different from when you started working in publishing? Good.

As the story of the Bodelian Library illustrated, sometimes a totally crazy idea can be the beginning of an enduring institution.

To repeat, the book is one of the most durable technologies and publishing is one of the most durable industries in history. Its durability has been put to the test more than once, and it will surely be put to the test again. Think of your current concerns as a minor stumbling block in a history filled with success, a history that has documented and shaped the world.

Don’t be afraid of the person who calls you up and says, “I have this crazy idea that may just change the way you work…” While the industry may shift, the printed word will always prevail.

Publishing has been around in some shape or form for 1000 years. Here’s hoping that it’s around for another 1000 more.

http://jennierosehalperin.me/futurebook-2014/